Reaper: Drone Strike: A Sniper Novel

by Nicholas Irving

  Harwood tossed a pebble outward toward the road where he had earlier heard the truck. It was the oldest trick in the book, but perhaps that was because it typically worked. In his goggles, he could see tire marks where a large wheeled vehicle had stopped and Y-turned. Most likely, that was the truck that had moaned up the ridge and idled for a bit. A delivery or a pickup. The vehicle had emitted the gurgling rattle of a diesel engine, a noise that Harwood was intensely familiar with from having sat in the back of military two-and-a-half-ton trucks. This truck had been here long enough to complete a transaction, but not long enough to be a part of the operations of the compound. It had come and gone, like the mailman or FedEx guy, but maybe a little longer. Something heavier than the average package that maybe took more than one person to lift and move. The guy in charge might have had to summon extra people or even lend a hand himself. Or the driver had to get out and help—but not for too long because the engine continued to idle.

  Harwood didn’t think it was a reinforcing action. Men would have jumped out of the back of the truck and boots would have thundered on the ground. Instead, there was maybe one person who jumped from the truck, a dialogue had ensued, and then maybe another set of boots hit the ground. Something was off loaded or loaded onto the truck.

  The two men above him gathered in the opening and spoke in Arabic. Harwood threw a rock into the driveway, then tucked tightly into the dead space beneath them. The first head that presented itself from the small opening was turned in the direction of the noise. He was wearing night-vision goggles, maybe an earlier version, because they seemed bulkier on the man’s face than what Harwood was accustomed to. With a heightened sense of alarm given the night-vision capability, Harwood wasted no time in firing two shots into the man’s temple. A second head briefly appeared as Harwood was backing away from the wall to improve his angle.

  The head backed away and was replaced with a rifle that was awkwardly attempting to depress into the dead space. Harwood snatched the rifle with his left hand and stood up fully as he pulled the man forward in an acrobatic three-point move. Pull, step, and shoot. He pumped two rounds through the man’s left eye as he wrenched the rifle away. The pull resulted in forward momentum that caused the man to tumble through the parapet.

  Harwood stepped back as the man thudded at his feet. He checked for a pulse, found none, stared into the open eyes of the dead man, chose to see evil, and convinced himself that he was on the right path, that Clutch was in this compound against his will. Otherwise, why have armed guards?

  The dead man before him had a pair of night-vision goggles hanging around his neck. Little good they did there. The man was heavy, not thin and wiry as Harwood would have expected, but large and soft. The guy in charge definitely did not get reinforcements from the truck. Otherwise, why put a chubby, unconditioned man on the front line of defense? It smacked of unpreparedness or desperation. Or maybe he had killed three of the tough guys and there were no replacements yet. If there were two men at each corner of the seven-foot wall, that meant the man in charge had originally placed eight on perimeter defense. Naturally, he would keep the fitter guards in tight with him. Two, maybe three, depending on what kind of operation he was running and what personal defense skills he might possess.

  Making good use of the large, dead man, Harwood rolled him against the wall and stepped on his fat ass, affording him a grip on the back side of the parapet. He hoisted himself up, like doing a pull-up and then a dip and then an L-seat on the rings, but less graceful. It was more difficult because of the rucksack on his back, but he managed.

  He landed softly on the elevated platform that was specifically designed to provide guards or observers long lines of sight into the northeast section of the Beqaa Valley and the plain upon which the compound sat. He knelt next to the first man he had killed and repositioned the body along the ten-foot-by-ten-foot platform so that it was perpendicular to the wall, which ran about a hundred meters to the north and a hundred meters to the southeast corner. The man had a Motorola radio secured to his belt. Harwood removed this, turned the volume down, and stuffed it in his pocket.

  The rising sliver of moon highlighted at the northwest corner the faint outline of two men in the same general disposition as the two he had just killed. Looking to the south, he saw that the two men were scanning using night-vision goggles.

  Harwood unsnapped his SR-25’s sling from his outer tactical vest and lay prone on the platform, first aiming to the south. He adjusted his scope, switched it to infrared, and pushed the button of his PAQ-4C infrared aiming light. Through the scope’s magnification, it was obvious the two men at the southeast corner were scanning and poised to defend. It was also clear that Harwood had been quiet enough that he hadn’t been discovered yet. Both men were kneeling and scanning their sectors, looking east into the valley and south along the plain. One man held night-vision goggles to his face, like holding binoculars, as he searched. The other turned toward the main house in the compound, as if he’d heard a noise or someone was talking to him. Harwood waited a moment to see if someone was approaching. The scope didn’t afford him the peripheral vision necessary to see anything other than that contained in the circular retina. He had two good shots. Take the one looking inward first, then the one focused outward. One, two.

  The inward-looking man’s lips weren’t moving. He wasn’t talking. Maybe listening or observing something. Could be a hand-and-arm signal from the house. Might be an animal wandering through the property.

  His head turned toward Harwood’s position, fixed on the location, and then tapped his partner without turning to look at him, which was when Harwood fired. The alignment was slightly off. While Harwood was going for a center forehead shot, the bullet appeared to graze his head, spinning him around. He was already moving to the second man, who was lifting and turning toward his partner.

  Harwood squeezed the trigger twice with the crosshairs on the man’s midsection, then moved swiftly to the wounded man, who was on one knee and lifting a radio to his mouth. It was a perfect profile shot to the skull. Harwood added a second for good measure and then came back to the second man, studied him for a couple of seconds, thought he saw a breath, the slightest exhale, so he put a bullet in the man’s head.

  Harwood pulled away from his rifle and lifted his head, looking toward the compound as he switched from his PVS-16 night-vision goggles to the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, which would provide him a more enhanced site picture as he transitioned inside the compound.

  The IVAS monitored his heart rate as well as provided him night, thermal, and infrared capabilities. Made by Microsoft, whose employees had petitioned the CEO not to deploy the system because it could aid soldiers in killing people. Well, no shit. That was the point. Eventually, the enemy would have that capability, and it was better that the U.S. Army had it first. A few of the employees quit, but most carried on. Thankfully, the CEO had told his employees to pound sand and enjoy the liberties that the military provided them.

  Regardless, Harwood was thankful to have a technological advantage when he faced such an overwhelming disadvantage in simple numbers.

  He raised the IVAS to his eyes. Nothing. No movement. He might have been more satisfied to see whatever the man on the southeast platform had seen, but the lights were off and all that was visible was a sprawling stucco two-story home with Spanish tiles overlapping on the roof.

  He rolled and spun around so that he was facing northwest. The situation had changed. Had the grazed guard been able to transmit a radio message? Were they going to high alert? The two men from the northwest platform were climbing down. They were jogging down the path to the house. It was a harder shot, but he’d done it a thousand times before. He focused on the lead man, placed the scope on his midsection, and squeezed. The second man bumped into the stumbling lead guard and stopped to look at his fallen comrade. Harwood took the head shot on the stationary man and felled him.

  Moving the scope back onto the lead
man, he put two more bullets into his midsection since he didn’t have a head shot.

  Six down, how many to go?

  Correction. Nine down, at least two more to go. Probably at least five more. He liked those odds a lot better than whatever they were previously.

  Because the house was two stories, he couldn’t see the southwest-facing platform, but he assumed there was one and that it had two guards who were perhaps repositioning. A common tactic for a seasoned commander was to collapse his security force in tighter if he had taken losses on his outer perimeter. Harwood recalled a mission in Afghanistan when his Ranger unit was attacking a senior Taliban leader redoubt. He had killed several of the outer perimeter security in similar fashion as he had done tonight. The Taliban commander pulled the remaining guards from the outer defenses to the inside of the house, forcing the Rangers to make several decisions without great intelligence on the home’s interior. Were there women and children inside? Other noncombatants? Could they cover the open space without being shot? What kind of weapons were inside the compound? Machine guns? Could they use an AC-130 aerial gunship to simply flatten the home and all the terrorists?

  Of course, tonight, Harwood didn’t have aerial support. He had absolutely no support. Thankfully, he had been able to top off his ammo and water resupply from the Sabrewing drone that had either been shot down or crashed of its own accord. Maybe even Clutch had crawled up to the controls and tried to fly the thing, if that were possible. He didn’t know.

  Wasting no time, Harwood clambered down the sloping steps and dashed directly at the house. He felt the adrenaline and momentum of being inside the enemy’s decision cycle. As he ran, he carried his SR-25 at port arms. He let his IVAS flop around his neck as he bolted as swiftly as possible to the house. He passed a pool surrounded by palm trees and a patio that led to a sliding glass door. A switchback stairwell cut north and then south, leading to most likely the master bedroom on the second floor.

  Harwood took the stairway, thinking it would be better to fight his way from top to bottom, clearing the enemy as he went. Kneeling next to the sliding door, he took a breath and placed his IVAS to his eyes. The augmented reality brought the entire inside of the bedroom to high-definition relief like a video game.

  The slider was unlocked, and he stepped into the massive master bedroom. The large bed was unmade. His reflection in the giant mirror above the bed momentarily startled him. Two doors to his left were open. One led to a large bathroom with a tub, shower, vanity, and toilet while the other was a walk-in closet the size of Harwood’s bedroom in Georgia.

  Clear in the bedroom and adjacent areas.

  His IVAS was connected through a local network to a fiber-optic camera inside his aiming light, which meant that he could see wherever he aimed the muzzle of his rifle. He poked it around the corner, the IVAS now truly looking like a video game. The curved stairwell led down from the landing on two sides. A giant chandelier hung above the foyer, which had a heavy wooden door. The windows were small and boxy. The light was minimal, and Harwood wondered if everyone had congregated in a basement. The heart rate monitor showed a steady sixty-four beats per minute, up from his resting rate of fifty-two.

  In either direction, there were doors that opened to the second-floor landing. The door to his left opened slowly. Harwood kept the muzzle trained in that direction while he was still on one knee leaning against the open door in the master bedroom. A man carrying a weapon walked slowly along the landing bypassing the first stairwell and headed toward Harwood. The floor was wood but carpeted with Persian rugs. Harwood laid his rifle on the floor in the doorway, easing it down soundlessly as he retrieved his knife. While he had the shot, the silencer would be loud in the confines of the house, and there would be no mistaking his location.

  He assumed that by now everyone in the compound understood that they were under siege by at least one, if not two or three commandos.

  The man approaching was not wearing night-vision goggles, and the entire upstairs was dark. The floorboards creaked under the man’s weight. Harwood stayed low and waited until the attacker presented himself in the doorway and took a tentative step across the doorjamb, spinning into the room in moderately trained fashion, clearing right and then left with his AK-47.

  It wasn’t his most graceful move ever, but Harwood lunged upward as the man almost tripped over him. His Blackhawk knife bit into the man’s abdomen as Harwood raked it upward until it caught on his sternum. The man gave out a loud gasp, aspirating blood as he coughed. Louder than Harwood wanted but quieter than a silenced pistol shot. Fifty-fifty whether someone heard it downstairs. Blood gushed over his hand as he heard the front door open down below.

  Two men tumbled inside. Maybe they were the southwest guards that he couldn’t see from his original point of attack outside.

  “Fawq!” a voice called out from below.

  The two men looked up. One held night-vision goggles to his face and most likely saw Harwood. He pointed up the opposite steps, and each man ran up opposing staircases, attempting to envelop his position. One guard stopped midway and took up a supporting-fire position. These guards appeared to know their tactics.

  Harwood spun his weapon to maintain observation of the man coming up the opposing steps and then switched to split screen on his IVAS, giving him a dual display where he could see where his rifle was aimed and the direction his face was aligned. The man who was still moving came up the opposite stairwell and quickly put his back to the wall, preventing Harwood from getting a clear shot.

  The man in the supporting position moved up the stairwell and put his back to the wall on the opposite side of the door. He was enveloped, exactly as they had planned.

  In his split-screen display, both men inched toward the opposite sides of the door. He stayed low, leaving his rifle on the floor as he retrieved his SIG pistol. The two sentries halted their advance, maybe confused about the rifle in the hallway. Harwood could see them using the “around the corner” function of the IVAS’s Bluetooth connection to his rifle scope. They were motioning toward each other, as in, “You go first, then I’ll follow. You go right, then I’ll go left.”

  The first man spun into the room. Harwood fired two rounds center mass, stopping him upright with the 9 mm hollow points. The silencer made a ratcheting pfft sound. The second man stumbled into the lead, firing wildly everywhere but where Harwood was lying in the middle of the floor. He waited patiently until the lead man fell to his knees, dead, and exposed the trail.

  Another double tap to the chest had the second attacker falling across his partner, landing with a thud. Harwood moved forward, scooped up his rifle, and stood on the landing overlooking the foyer and living area below.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jasar Tankian

  Tankian stood in the kitchen holding a Luger pistol and a Gurkha knife he had stolen off a dead British soldier that he had sold to famed terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during the Iraq War.

  “Fawq!” he shouted when the men from guard tower four had entered the front doors. He numbered his towers starting from the northwest corner in clockwise fashion.

  Between the two captives, Tankian now had maybe €3 million worth of commodities in his basement. The transactions were never clean, though, and were fraught with double cross opportunities, which was one of the reasons he preferred to stay out of the kidnapping business. He did it better than most, but it was his least favorite business line.

  While the financial prospects were good, Tankian had an ironclad survival instinct about himself and his business. After inspecting his prisoners, he had gone upstairs and lain in bed for a bit, his mind spinning from the potential payday to the fact that someone had killed three of his men earlier this morning. Whoever had done so was still out there, perhaps lying in wait for him. He tossed and twisted the sheets as his men stood in the hallway and on the balcony guarding him.

  Then he had either heard something or dreamed it. A sound like thunder had come from outside. It to
ok a moment for him to register it, but he awoke to the guards coming inside and conducting their protection plan. Their mission was to keep him alive, not pursue the attacker. They had gone downstairs into the kitchen and then outside, where he had watched his two men get shot at tower 3 in the southeast. Then came the noise from the deck, and he abandoned protocol, ordering his men up to eliminate the threat. The two men ran upstairs, one awaking the third personal security guard as they approached.

  Now he was alone in the kitchen, feeding men into the fray with no idea who this man might be who was slaying his employees. If six were dead outside—he’d had no response on his radio calls to tower 1, 2, and 3—and five inside, with the three at the plane crash location, that left him with six men, two downstairs with the prisoners, Shakir who was outside with the drones, Khouri who was in Tripoli, and two from guard tower number 4. He had some ranch hands above the stables a quarter mile away on the property but they weren’t fighters.

  The guard post 4 men were up the stairs, their tactics providing him hope. A double envelopment with one man watching over the other, negating the attacker’s angle of fire. As soon as he felt the slightest whiff of momentum, it was quickly snuffed. The gunfire he’d heard did not portend well for him and his compound. Two more dead. Four left.

  By his calculation, he had maybe a minute before the soldier on the top floor realized there were no more men coming upstairs. This was not a man, Tankian presumed, who would allow momentum to ebb. Rather, he was an unstoppable force hell-bent on rescuing his fellow soldier.

  This was the curse of the kidnap.

  The American soldier was not a prize but an albatross. Like a stock market crash, Tankian’s fortunes had gone from soaring to diving. Twenty men to, now, six. In business terms, that was a 70 percent loss.